DATE: Sunday, October 5, 1997               TAG: 9710020684

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY LENORE HART 

                                            LENGTH:   87 lines

GROWING PAINS, GROWING PRESSURES

THE BODY PROJECT

An Intimate History of American Girls

JOAN JACOBS BRUMBERG

Random House. 268 pp. $25.

Society labels animals, birds, even lands as protected. But Joan Jacobs Brumberg's The Body Project gives girlhood endangered status. Gradually, she argues, the shaping of daughters' ethics and behavior shifted from parents, to doctors, to popular culture and media. We're light years from Victorian ideals of modesty and character. Girls' bodies have become the whole point, ``projects'' to be controlled, shaped, perfected.

Brumberg, a history professor at Cornell, uses photoessays and adolescent diaries, in chapters such as ``Sanitizing Puberty'' and ``Perfect Skin,'' to show how emphasis on girls' bodies has evolved from nurturing to predatory. In the 1700s, girls learned from a ``single-sex community'' of female relatives and neighbors. But by 1860, men and women felt repressed about all bodily functions. Mothers blanched even at the idea of speaking frankly about bodily maturation. Gradually, doctors supplanted embarrassed mothers as professional knowledge-bringers.

Soon sharp-eyed commerce targeted female puberty: Disposable sanitary napkins were invented. Mothers dreading ``vulgar'' discussions could (and still do) hand daughters the pamphlet tucked in each box. Instead of being guided, girls were ``reading their way into adulthood.'' Disconnection had begun.

By 1900, indoor plumbing and bathroom mirrors gave girls a new focal point: self as beauty project. Ads for the booming ``personal hygiene'' industry focused on ``keeping clean.'' Acne denoted illness or deviant practices; a clear complexion was paramount. Even parents who wouldn't pay for college would often shell out hundreds to clear up a pimply face. The cosmetic industry responded: Clearasil was born. By the late 1960s, doctors were prescribing The Pill to treat acne. In 1992, Proctor and Gamble spent $11 million to push Oil of Olay to high school girls.

``Marketing strategists understood that sales to the baby-boom generation . exacting standards,'' Brumberg writes.

Better nutrition caused the age of menarche (16 in 1808) to decline. Now it's 11 or 12; sometimes nine or 10. Advertisers aimed campaigns at these new consumers, bombarding girls from toddlerhood with ideal figures to emulate. The brassiere evolved from Victorian child's undergarment to highly engineered ``Wonderbra.'' Women routinely regard their bodies as objects to deprive, pare down, enhance and control, for attention and approval.

Lately, says Brumberg, ``real heat is on the lower body, especially thighs and buttocks . . . a taut female pelvis, sleek thighs and a sculptured behind (are) both objects of desire and symbols of success.''

Even slender teen-age girls now disparage themselves: ``My stomach hangs out,'' ``My thighs are disgusting.''

Both sexes, Brumberg notes, are subjected to peer pressure at school, but culture emphasizes female body images. Girls routinely report ``rating systems,'' scaled one to 10. Inexperienced, gawky boys ``value'' female classmates, taking authority ``from popular culture, which made male perspectives on female bodies all-important.''

Brumberg also examines birth control, body piercing, unwed motherhood's appeal to insecure girls raised in impoverished, dreary environments. One teen, asked her aspirations before pregnancy, thought a long while and finally said she had not had any.

We have ``a mismatch between culture and biology,'' says Brumberg. Young women develop earlier. Society does not protect them. Popular culture and advertising play on insecurities, encourage precocious sexuality. Though Brumberg's students say ``how much better things became for American women (since) the emergence of more sexual freedom,'' they feel pressured into sex. They are accosted in frightening ways, even at school, by boys once regarded as friends. They hate their own bodies.

Brumberg isn't pushing a return to Victorian morality, though she deplores ``idealogues who make sexual autonomy the ultimate value for adolescents.'' Why not spend such fervor, she asks, getting girls freedom ``to be heard at school in an equal way with boys . . . to develop their bodies without constantly measuring themselves?''

Forget ``Just Say No'' axioms, she says. Girls need advocacy, open talk based on their daily realities. Constraints and curfews help younger girls, but more is needed for safe passage to adulthood. Maturing girls must be told all the options, the pleasures and the dangers. They need help forming a standard of sexual ethics with integrity.

The safety of this endangered group, The Body Project argues, depends on it. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' is a novelist who

lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu